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Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Disqus 2012 gaining new UI in "My Disqus" tab

Well...what do 'ya know. We all knew that Disqus was going to do something with its my Disqus tab. So many people have requested features such as the ability to reply to comments directly from the My Disqus section. A new UI change is under way, and while I don't know if it will stick, I think that something good is about to happen.I discovered this while using Disqus 2012 on my site, a political site (helping them with Disqus support), and on Android Police. I clicked on the My Disqus tab to clear my notifications, and then I saw two different tabs under it. Before I put down my thoughts on this, let me show you what they actually look like. You can judge for yourselves as well.Since most of these results were private data, I had to blur out most of it. I did my best to label what I didn't show, for the sake of protecting the other person's identify.Now: In your network

As you can see in the first tab, you see the "Now" section. This section is dubbed as "in your network." What this basically means is your feed. If you follow someone for example, you have their activity show up in your dashboard, and also in the My Disqus section of Disqus 2012. One downside to this was that it was sorta hard to see notifications, depending on your opinion. Having just a personal feed and actual notifications separated tabs might be a working solution, but like I said before -- we don't know yet if these changes will sick.The individual feed is also sorted by "Discussions", which separates different Disqus powered sites. For example, a user might have a feed on Techman's World, but might also have a feed on the Disqus blog. Not really to name a specific name, but more of an example. From the boxes above, you can also see that there would be comment meta data information.Notifications

While less blur, you can see this image a lot more clearly. You can see a commenter's avatar, their user name, the post title (page) they were replying to you on, and the actual blog/site name listed in the Disqus admin panel.Also...Besides the changes mentioned above, there no other visual difference with the rest of the parts of Disqus 2012. The community and comment part of the discussion remains the same. If you are also wondering about the Disqus custom badges, there is currently no word on this other then the feature is still in its testing phase. Even major (and paying!) publishers such as NPR have received the same response from Disqus as well.So...I'm not sure what exactly to say about this. I guess I can start giving early feedback on this, and I can of course post it here on my site. When checking the activity feed (the left tab), the 3 loading cogs/gears disappear quickly, revealing the loaded data. When you are trying to access the notification tab, it takes notifiable longer, even excessively longer. I have to wait around 10 seconds or more. This change just happened today, so there is probably some kinks to get ironed out with such an early introduction.